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akshaya07's review
2.0
It is funny that even though I am giving this book a lower rating I annotated this one a lot, and it has snippets that are stunning and relatable at times. The essay collection deals with topics like childhood memories and crushes, love interests, and how we perceive love later as an adult, desires and in turn, becoming objects of others' desires. As someone who has a habit of writing journals in this format, I was biased when I started this book. It is an essay collection, and we already know what to expect going into the book, right? However, despite dealing with intriguing topics of day-to-day life I couldn't grasp any depth in the whole collection. While some are more interesting than others, I personally liked her longer writings than short snippets. The longer ones had a narrative style, examples through experiences, and a way of including the readers to feel a relatability factor. It could have been better, but I loved some parts of the book even though all-in-all I wasn't a big fan.
heyitsamandarae's review against another edition
fast-paced
5.0
Artist statement was my favorite essay.
awhillary01's review
3.0
i love it as much as i hate to admit that i love it, having only read the first 3 stories. all three consist of the protagonist's history and her reporting seemingly unrelated events in an alternating manner, then conclude in an elaboration of how things went that way. it didn't look like an 'a-ha' moment for her, the character just went with the flow and accepted things as they are, as if she realised it but didn't move a finger.
the metonymy writing does not really clicked as what we can draw from such a series of events was rather vague, but i enjoyed to be on the author's train of thought. this piece is what i have always tried to pour on my private blog on days i questioned the meaning of here and there, full of angst but took nothing seriously.
this book is to be taken that way.
the metonymy writing does not really clicked as what we can draw from such a series of events was rather vague, but i enjoyed to be on the author's train of thought. this piece is what i have always tried to pour on my private blog on days i questioned the meaning of here and there, full of angst but took nothing seriously.
this book is to be taken that way.
chillcox15's review against another edition
3.0
I have this fond memory, one that could take the form of a Chelsea Hodson essay, in fact, borne from a wistful time in my life when I was jobless and nearly penniless one summer, feeling paralyzed by indecisions and unforced boredom, when I heard about a great new chapbook called Pity the Animal, which I biked to Powell's to read. It was short, I could sit in the gigantic downtown store and read the whole thing. It was cheap, I could afford to spend the $5 to buy it for myself. It was small, I could fit it in my breast pocket on the ride home. I did all three, and read it again a few times that summer. It felt personal, moreso than the books that filtered in from the library and stacked next to the papasan I sat on all day as I had little else to do but read. It's a bit of a disappointment, then, to pick up Hodson's new collection, which includes Pity the Animal, and find it to be too heavy, too big, too laborious. What made that little chapbook special feels repetitive here, because Hodson so rarely changes gears away from that tone, of the semi-mystic, semi-regretful memorysmith.